This is the title of a new book by Anand Giridharadas, an American author and son of immigrant Indian parents who grew up in Cleveland and worked in Mumbai for almost 6 years, first as a management consultant and then as a writer. He writes the “Currents” column for The New York Times and its global edition, the International Herald Tribune. This week, he gave a talk about his book at Harvard’s Humanities Center. It was followed by comments from Sugata Bose and Homi Bhabha, both well-known historians and faculty at Harvard. The talk was unusual in that it was held at lunch, which made it a little challenging for me to get out and attend. But I was keen on being there – whatever I had read about the book seemed very interesting and the Barker Humanities Center (where the talk was hosted) is a beautiful McKim Mead & White designed building that was even more beautifully restored by my firm a few years back.
Anyways, so the talk…It began with Anand giving a bit of an insight into his relationship with his subject – contemporary India. A remark he made particularly struck me- he said that as a child born to immigrant parents in the US, his first introduction to India was a country that his parents left. It unconsciously implied for him that there was something that was worth leaving. While it was not intentional, many of his parents’ references to India recounted how life had been somewhat limiting in India and liberating in the US. His mother would often narrate how she could not dress in a certain way in India but could do so half way across the globe in Ohio. His childhood visits to India somewhat ratified his parents’ accounts. When he made a decision to live and work in Mumbai as an adult in 2003, the India that welcomed him posed a strikingly different picture. It was this shock that prompted him to write the book. He made it clear at the outset though, that the book is not about the technological and economic revolution that has taken place in India. Rather it is about the cultural changes that are rampant in Indian society yet are rarely talked about. The first major change that he identified was a greater emphasis on the ‘self’. Many personal decisions such as career, marriage, place of residence etc. that were once taken to appease family members, were now based largely, if not solely on personal happiness. While rapidly embracing lifestyles of their western counterparts, the Indian youth were different in that they lived comfortably within ‘simultaneous truths’. They lived in the ‘both/and’ rather than the ‘either/or’ world. While they partied, smoked and doped their way into the evening, they still found time (and sobriety) to have dinner with their grandparents at night. The book chapters are organized under headings like : Love, Anger, Ambition..and so on. He talked briefly about anecdotes in the book – there is a story of a poor kid from a village who was able to make it big in Mumbai. He counted his conversation with a school principal about the usual complaint that Indian kids are not creative thinkers and are unable to think out-of-the-box. The response he received was that parents and their over-protective attitudes (born out of love) are to blame - the culture of Don’t do this! Don’t go there! breeds compliance and kills ingenuity amongst kids. Under Anger, his book talks about the Naxalite insurgency. There is also an extended interview with Mukesh Ambani.
Anand’s talk was followed by comments from Sugata Bose. After briefly praising the book for tackling an overwhelming subject, Prof. Bose proceeded with some critical remarks. The first being that Anand’s story of India is really the story of Urban India –and not the vast majority of the country which is still primarily rural and agrarian. He asked – where are the stories of farmers’ suicides and the abject poverty of tribals? He asked why there was not a chapter titled ‘Greed’ that talked about the gargantuan scale of corruption that has pervaded every aspect of contemporary Indian life. He also proposed that the ideas of ‘self’ and ‘social equality’ are not imports of the West or ideas that the Indian Maoists have borrowed from China, rather their roots can be found in Indian culture itself—in the texts of Kalidasa and Mahabharata.
I had to leave early so couldn’t stay till the end. Also I haven’t yet read the book. Nonetheless, I thought the talk was very interesting. I agree that Anand’s book seemed biased towards urban India, but I agree with the explanation he gave later, that the subject is so vast he chose to tackle it as a ‘sliver’ of society. He wrote about the cultural changes that he observed living in Mumbai & while he did make an attempt to cover the hinterland, the reach was decidedly limited. Also while Prof. Bose’s comments may be right that historic Indian texts are rife with concepts of reconciling the ‘self’ with ‘society’ and notions of equality etc. their connection with contemporary India is unarguably and unfortunately broken. This is perhaps why the Indian youth turn to seemingly radical ideas from elsewhere around the globe, instead of reaching in-house to our rich past.